The Northumbrian Riviera

To the coast! And an abrupt change of mood as riverside North Shields turns 90 degrees north to seaside; business turns to pleasure, and production to consumption.

Just as the Victorians invented industrial life, and the discipline of the factory hooter and dockyard clock, so too did they conceive of leisure as a commodity that was consumed at certain times and in certain demarcated zones. By 1911 Britain had over a hundred substantial seaside resorts, from the big boys Blackpool and Brighton to lower league Largs and Llandudno. The Northumbrian Riviera fits somewhere in between these poles, more akin to the maritime resort suburbs of Penarth or Southsea; but like all of them it was a place of beaches, bathing and boarding houses – with a big slug of hedonism.

Here the eight miles of metal-bashing Tyneside – from Newcastle to the sea – transforms sharply into the ancestral coastal…